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City may replace Old City Hall bells with recording

An electronic system would emit similar sounds and cost less. Click for a virtual tour of the tower and audio.

One of Toronto's most familiar landmarks, the clock at the top of the Old City Hall tower, may end up with electronic guts instead of the mechanical movement that has turned its large hands for more than a century. (TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Soft white light infuses the top of the seldom-seen clock tower atop Old City Hall, with its century-old mechanical timepiece. (Chris So / The Toronto Star)

By Daniel DaleUrban Affairs Reporter

Tues., March 15, 2011

The city is considering silencing the three 110-year-old bells inside the landmark Old City Hall clock tower and installing an electronic device that could emit similar sounds for less money.

A request for proposals issued Tuesday asked companies to bid for a five-year contract to maintain the clock’s complex mechanical innards. But the request also said the city would consider proposals “to remove the heritage timepiece and replace it with an electric clock that can be programmed to provide the same time keeping and bell chiming.”

Virtual tours of the city’s clock tower:

Mike McCoy, the city’s director of facility operations, said the wording of the request was mistaken in implying the city would dismantle the timepiece if an electronic replacement was installed. An edited version of the document posted shortly after the Star interviewed McCoy uses the word “disconnect” rather than “remove.”

He said the city far prefers to maintain the timepiece than to replace it. But maintenance costs about $50,000 per year, and officials have to assess all options even though “it will be controversial” to contemplate discontinuing a system that has provided a distinctive backdrop to downtown life for more than a century.

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“The clock is a treasure,” McCoy said. “It’s just an amazing piece of machinery; I wish I could take people up the clock tower and they could watch it work. And it’s one of the last of its kind. But . . . we’re faced with looking at the cost of things. That’s a part of the reality of budgets being sort of fixed.”

He said the city could install an electric device to strike the bells, “or it might be a recorded sound, as has been done with other clocks around the world.”

The exterior of the clock would not be affected by any change to its inner workings, he said.

The clock’s main bell, which weighs 11,648 pounds (5,283 kilograms), first rang on Dec. 31, 1900. Aside from occasional repair interruptions — one began in the fall of 2010 and ended in January — the main bell sounds heavily every hour, the two smaller bells more softly on the quarter-hour.

Heritage Toronto board member and architectural historian Marta O’Brien, who got to visit the clock tower in 2009, said her primary interest is ensuring the timepiece and bells are preserved even if they are no longer used. “I would be sad to have them replaced by an electronic sound,” O’Brien said, “but I’m certainly not an expert on bells, and I can’t speak to the logistics or expenses of maintaining them.”

Phil Abernethy, the junior member of the father-son team of horologists that conducted a major restoration of the timepiece in 1992 and has held the maintenance contract for most of the years since, said he was “not surprised” the city was considering electrification as a money-saving move. He acknowledged the clock needs “constant attention and constant adjustment.” But he said a non-mechanical timepiece would be “very unromantic.”

“Retrofits are something that we do, but we wouldn’t like to see it done on this site if possible,” said Abernethy, 47. “But that’s up for the city to decide.”

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